A Look into Child Welfare Cases: Risk and Re-reports in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Child welfare services receive a large proportion of referrals due to concerns about child exposure to intimate partner violence (CEIPV). Fathers, cohabitating and non-cohabitating boyfriends, and stepfathers are disproportionately the perpetrators of CEIPV. Assessment of CEIPV within child welfare services does not include an examination of IPV-specific risk factors found to predict recidivism and dangerous violence in other public sectors. The objectives of my dissertation were to: (1) Describe the profiles and characteristics of fathers and determine what is known about child and IPV risk among fathers transferred to ongoing services following verified CEIPV; (2) Examine whether level of risk was associated with child welfare workers’ decisions on level of involvement with fathers as part of ongoing services; (3) Examine which case characteristics were associated with a new report that was investigated and verified (i.e., verified re-report) by child welfare within two years of transfer to ongoing services, and (4) Determine whether IPV-specific risk factors predicted verified re-reports relative to the risk factors commonly assessed by child welfare. The sample included 231 cases verified for father-perpetrated CEIPV. Results confirmed the presence of moderate to high numbers of IPV-specific risk factors in verified cases of CEIPV; however, cumulative IPV risk did not predict level of worker involvement with fathers. Cumulative child risk significantly predicted worker level of involvement, such that higher risk predicted less worker involvement with fathers. At the bivariate level, fathers’ living status (i.e., whether or not he lived with a child) was negatively associated with cumulative child risk, such that more risk was related to fathers not living with their child. Examining outcomes over two years found that 22.5% of families received a verified re-report to child welfare services, with most re-reported for verified CEIPV. Surprisingly, IPV risk level was not associated with verified re-reports for cases involved in ongoing services. Given the overrepresentation of racialized minorities in the child welfare system, follow-up exploratory analyses were conducted to examine possible differences between race groups on what predicts workers’ involvement and verified re-reports to child welfare. The implications of this study and future directions are discussed, with the overarching suggestion that valid risk assessment tools are needed to help direct practice to meet the safety needs of diverse children and mothers facing IPV.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".